Archive: June 2015

2 year Climate researcher position at Rossby Centre

The Rossby Centre works across the spectrum of global and regional climate modelling, analysis of climate change and climate variability, and research into climate change impacts as part of the wider SMHI Research Department of around 100 scientists. As a partner, or coordinator, of numerous national Swedish, European and international projects the Rossby Centre has responsibility for the effective and innovative communication and dissemination of project results to a wide variety of end users from the Swedish forestry industry to EU policymakers and also the wider general public.

You will be working with the analysis of climate scenarios with a focus on southern Africa as part of a recently initiated international research project FRACTAL. A starting point for your work will be the global and regional climate scenarios from CMIP5 and CORDEX. A key component of this position is to identify the climate change signal in different variables and estimate how robust or uncertain they are. At a later stage in the project new, regional climate scenarios at higher horizontal resolutions will be analysed in more detail and put in context of the larger ensembles from CMIP5 and CORDEX.

Your profile

The Rossby Centre are looking for a candidate with an academic education in meteorology, climatology or closely related subject. You should have considerable experience of working with climate data and climate scenarios. A PhD is mandatory and post-doctoral experience is preferred. Experience in mathematical statistics would be desirable.

Good programming skills in packages/languages such as Python, R, Octave/Matlab, IDL and CDO is preferable as is experience of working in a Linux environment. You should be accustomed to handling large volumes of data, most likely in NetCDF format. A good level of written and spoken English is essential. Knowledge of Swedish is not required but there will be opportunities to learn, should you wish.

The position is limited to 2 years and will be based in Norrköping.

To find out more

For further information and details of how to apply see the vacancy notice on the SMHI website

Special Issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences

The Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences (2014 Impact Factor: 1.347) will be publishing a special issue on Regional Climate Downscaling over the Asia-Pacific region. The deadline for paper submission is the 15th October 2015 and the issue will be published in April 2016.

For further information click here or you could visit the journal website and click “Call for Papers” on the right side of the website.

Kick off for new phase of CORDEX-Africa Analysis Workshops

Representatives from across the CORDEX Africa community came together for the first scoping workshop of the next phase of CORDEX-Africa Analysis Workshops in Johannesburg on 26th & 27th May 2015. This workshop series follows on from a highly successful first series, which has led to 9 peer reviewed journal articles authored by members of the African regional teams. The workshop was funded through a combination of support from the Swedish Secretariat for Environmental Earth Systems Science (SSEESS), WCRP and SMHI.

The goals of this first scoping workshop were to: reinstate the regional teams and also initiate the new Central Africa regional team; identify key regional research questions; develop or adopt appropriate methodologies to address these; and to discuss how to engage the user community. The focus of this meeting was to provide context from the wider CORDEX and international strategy, provided by participation of the IPOC Director and ICSU representative, and to set the research agenda of the workshops to follow and thus only included senior regional team members.A number of participants who were unable to join physically connected through Skype for key discussion sessions.

The workshop was highly successful resulting in a list of clearly defined research questions to be addressed by each of the regional teams, a publication plan initiated, training and infrastructure requirements highlighted, and a plan for effective liaison with end users and other relevant programmes and initiatives. Funding is now being confirmed for the next two workshops to take place during Autumn 2015 and early 2016. Details from the meeting can be found on the CORDEX-Africa website.

For further information contact CORDEX Africa point of contact Chris Lennard, CSAG, UCT.